Search Results (16)

This article is a response to a paper, published last year in this journal, by Grace, Nind, de Haas and Hope. The authors sought to “question how we create knowledge and challenge underlying assumptions about valid forms of knowing” (p. 3). Their focus is on inclusive research with people who have profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMDs). They describe their approach as “being with”, aligned with the experience of meaning, as opposed to doing research with people, which they locate in knowledge extraction. Recognising the authors’ commitment to foregrounding the personhood of people with PIMDs, a critique is developed in order to open a debate around issues of ethical research practices, decolonisation and conceptualisation of ‘deep knowledge’. Full article

The objective of this study was to document an experience of training community environmental leaders in the context of sustainable development in localities surrounding the Chautengo Lagoon, Guerrero, Mexico. Specifically, we explored the epistemological, theoretical, deontological, and pedagogical–didactic components that must be considered when designing a training process for community environmental leaders in rural contexts. A mixed, descriptive, transversal approach was used to articulate scientific knowledge with local knowledge. Twelve semi-structured interviews identified potential environmental leaders, while nineteen surveys assessed training needs. Subsequently, a tailored capacity-building program was designed, implemented, and evaluated, which assessed empirical knowledge of communities and sustainable practices. A total of 19 leaders with organizational and mobilization skills were trained, successfully engaging 1500 people in an environmental cleanup campaign. The program covered key topics such as sustainable development management, environmental education for sustainability, and local governance, resulting in the formation of an environmental advocacy committee. Participants rated the program positively for its design (90%), content, materials, facilitator performance (71%), and duration (67%). This study contributes to the understanding of community environmental leadership in Latin America highlighting the value of local knowledge as a tool for environmental governance and sustainable social change. Our findings suggest that strengthening community leadership with participatory methodologies can improve environmental awareness, community resilience, and long-term ecological conservation. The program can be replicated in vulnerable communities in other contexts and positively impact local governance. Full article

In many landscapes worldwide, fire regimes and human–fire interactions were reorganised by colonialism and continue to be shaped by neo-colonial processes. The introduction of fire suppression policies and state-centric property-rights systems across conservation areas and the intentional erasure of Indigenous governance systems and knowledge have served to decouple Indigenous fire-dependent communities from culturally mediated fire regimes and fire-adapted landscapes. This has driven a decline in anthropogenic fires while simultaneously increasing wildfire risk where Indigenous people have been excluded, resulting in widespread social–ecological vulnerabilities. Much contemporary fire research also bears colonial legacies in its epistemological traditions, in the global geographical distribution of research institutions, and the accessibility of research outputs. We report on a two-day workshop titled ‘Fire Management Across Contested Landscapes’ convened concurrently in Nairobi, Kenya, and London, UK. The workshop formed part of a series of workshops on ‘Decolonising Fire Science’ held by the Leverhulme Centre for Wildfires, Environment and Society, UK. The workshop in Nairobi invited diverse Kenyan stakeholders to engage in participatory activities that facilitate knowledge sharing, aiming to establish an inclusive working fire network. Activities included rich pictures, world café discussions, participatory art, and the co-development of a declaration to guide fire management in Kenya. Meanwhile, in London, Leverhulme Wildfires researchers explored participatory research methodologies including rich pictures and participatory video, and developed a declaration to guide more equitable research. There were opportunities throughout the workshop for participants in Nairobi and London to engage in dialogue with one another, sharing their experiences and understandings of complex fire challenges in Kenya and globally. Full article

Climate change is challenging in mountain areas, and initiatives to define resilience programs appear essential to face global warming impacts. Despite the participatory strategy being primarily considered the best solution to involve local actors in adopting resilience actions, the literature stresses how mountain dwellers, like farmers, are often considered passive subjects, and their ability to understand climate change and the actions to adopt is inadequate. Based on this consideration, we aim to highlight the relevance of the mountain actors’ agency, their “lay” situated knowledge, and the epistemology for co-defining resilience actions. Adopting a “weak version” of the Actor-Network Theory as the research posture, we argue that farmers’ perceptions of climate vulnerability is based on their experience of it, and their resilience actions or suggestions are coherent with their endowment resources (financial and knowledge) and their position in the economic system. In this sense, local actors’ initiatives to face climate change can be limited by their specific position in the socioeconomic contest-related value chain and their specific relationship with local natural settings. A participative strategy to co-define resilience actions can help identify more effective initiatives according to the context between actors. Moreover, it can contribute to the knowledge exchange among “lay” local actors, experts, and policymakers, benefiting everyone; farmers could identify suitable solutions to face climate vulnerability, experts could increase their knowledge of local contexts, and policymakers could define adequate policies. Focusing on a specific area in “Alto Molise” (Italy), we present research results to contribute to the debate on climate resilience in mountain areas, stressing the significance of the local actors’ agency, the presence of the different epistemologies put in play (lay and expert ones), the co-production of knowledge, and the need to actively involve local actors in designing practices and policies to face climate change. Full article

This article argues for incommensurability, incoherence, and difference as the grounds through which to think about sexualized harm and its redress. It seeks to remove the “me” from the “too”, and to instead consider the structures of white supremacy and neocolonial power that have facilitated white Western feminists’ ability to participate in shaping a hegemonic discourse of sexualized harm and its transnational travelling. The article traces the author’s personal genealogy of rights work in the context of shifts in international jurisprudence in relation to wartime sexualized violence. It looks back and reflects on an eight-year feminist participatory action research project that accompanied 54 Mayan women protagonists who survived a multiplicity of harm, including sexual violence, during Guatemala’s 36-year genocidal war. The project documented the protagonists’ engagement with transitional justice mechanisms, including a paradigmatic court case and a national reparations program, as part of their struggles for redress. The concept of “protagonism” is used to understand agency in the aftermath of genocidal violence as relational, co-constructed, and imbued with power. The meaning of sexualized harm is always “in-translation” between Western and Mayan onto-epistemological positionings, as Mayan women seek to suture land-body-territory in their multifaceted strategies for redress that engage but always exceed rights regimes. Full article

Youth participatory action research (YPAR) is a critical approach that engages youth as collaborative partners in research. It acknowledges the unique expertise that youth have on the adversities and assets that are present in their familiar systems, such as schools and the community. These projects are often designed to identify and address community problems; however, our projects with local youth aimed to shed light on a pre-existing community asset, Salud y Cariño, an after-school community organization, and a particular moment in time, namely the pandemic shelter-in-place. The mission and epistemologies of the organization set forth by the co-founder and Executive Director informed our partnership and guided our approach to this work. Utilizing qualitative methodologies, the authors (a faculty member, two graduate students, co-founder and director of a local non-profit, and a high school senior) collaboratively designed and implemented an interview-style documentary and photovoice projects, which garnered testimonies on participants’ experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic regarding school and the community organization. By centering the perspectives of participating Latinx girls and non-binary youth, we demonstrate the effects of this local community organization on its participants during and after the COVID lockdown, and what it means to the youth they serve. The identified themes associated with program participation during this time include the following: (1) building community and a family, (2) creating a welcoming safe space, and (3) infusing love and happiness into everyday activities. We conclude by reflecting on the process of building these collaborative projects and their implementation. Our reflections and findings contribute new insights into utilizing YPAR approaches to research and showcase leading community assets and actors. Full article

Based on a participatory research project on the practices and representations of young people in distressed neighborhoods, this article examines the contributions and limitations of a participatory approach in terms of scientific production. How does participation affect social science research? How does it challenge methodological and epistemological principles, knowledge building, and the nature of that knowledge? To what extent is it heuristically stimulating from this point of view? Full article

Higher education institutions in South Africa are still dominated by colonial traditions, course content, staff with colonial privileges and attachments, and discriminatory structures and systems. Practical theology and theologians are no exception. This article seeks to investigate the correlations between social just pedagogies and social justice. Social just pedagogies consider the role of the students, lecturers, and non-human phenomena as contributing to epistemology and agency formation. Normative pedagogies remain important criteria for knowledge production and graduate attributes within the South African higher education landscape. Within practical theology, the pedagogies that are used to form students and impart knowledge are still dominated by classical teaching methods that are power-centred and biased towards the privileged. The aim of this article is thus not to replace the normative pedagogies but to challenge the normativity and essentialism that has characterised colonial, race-related, and top-down knowledge production. I will introduce a social just pedagogy of teaching practical theology that critically engages and challenges the privileged normative position of classical practical theology. A social just pedagogy will bring the centre of learning and teaching into the structure of the lecture room, a participatory method of knowledge production, students, and the lecturers. The hierarchical structure of the South African university system will be engaged with as an instrument of traditional classical knowledge production systems. Teaching practical theology through social just pedagogies will also contribute to social justice within democratic South Africa. The question that I will address is how teaching practical theology at higher education institutions can contribute to the agency of social justice in South Africa. Full article

What should the philosophical study of religion look like in an epoch of increasing political polarization, cultural ferment, and religious fragmentation? Drawing on the work of Amy Hollywood and others, I argue that philosophers seeking to understand what seem to be incommensurable moral and religious communities ought to attend more fully to the role of spiritual practice and moral formation as irreducible components of certain beliefs and ethical intuitions. However, while such an account might invite a reductive reading in which the object of religious belief is taken to be simply the practice, ritual, etc., I engage the thought of Michael Polanyi to argue that such irreducibly participatory truth claims can be understood to aim at a reality that exceeds the structures of formation and ways of life to which they are indexed. Full article

Research remains a site of struggle for First Nations peoples globally. Biomedical research often reinforces existing power structures, perpetuating ongoing colonisation by dominating research priorities, resource allocation, policies, and services. Addressing systemic health inequities requires decolonising methodologies to facilitate new understandings and approaches. These methodologies promote a creative tension and productive intercultural dialogue between First Nations and Western epistemologies. Concurrently, the potential of critical theory, social science, and community participatory action research approaches to effectively prioritise First Nations peoples’ lived experience within the biomedical worldview is increasingly recognised. This article describes learnings regarding research methods that enable a better understanding of the lived experience of rheumatic heart disease—an intractable, potent marker of health inequity for First Nations Australians, requiring long-term engagement in the troubled intersection between Indigenist and biomedical worldviews. Working with Yolŋu (Aboriginal) co-researchers from remote Northern Territory (Australia), the concept of ganma (turbulent co-mingling of salt and fresh water) was foundational for understanding and applying relationality (gurrutu), deep listening (nhina, nhäma ga ŋäma), and the use of metaphors—approaches that strengthen productive dialogue, described by Yolŋu co-researchers as weaving a ‘mat we can all sit on’. The research results are reported in a subsequent article. Full article

(1) Background: COVID-19 disruptions offer researchers insight into how pandemics are at once biological and social threats, as communities struggle to construct meaning from novel challenges to their ontological status quo. Multiple epistemes, in which public health imperatives confront and negotiate locally derived knowledge and traditions, vie for legitimacy and agency, resulting in new cultural forms. (2) Methods: To investigate the context and construction of community responses, a systematic review of qualitative literature was conducted with the aim of evaluating those insights provided by empirical, social field research in low- and middle-income countries since the onset of COVID-19. Six scholarly databases were searched for empirical, qualitative, field-based, or participatory research that was published in peer-reviewed journals between December 2019 and August 2021. (3) Results: Twenty-five studies were selected for data extraction, following critical appraisal for methodological rigor by two independent reviewers, and were then analyzed thematically. Faced with unprecedented social ruptures, restrictions in social and physical mobility, and ever-looming uncertainties of infection, financial insecurity, stigma, and loss, communities worldwide reacted in multiple and complex ways. Pervasive misinformation and fear of social rejection resulted in noncompliance with pandemic sanctions, resistance, and increased isolation, allowing the spread of the disease. The meaning of, and understandings about, COVID-19 were constructed using traditional, religious, and biomedical epistemologies, which were occasionally in conflict with each other. Innovations and adaptations, through syntheses of traditional and biomedical discourses and practice, illustrated community resilience and provided models for successful engagement to improve public health outcomes. (4) Conclusion: Local context and community engagement were indispensable considerations when enacting effective public health interventions to meet the challenges of the pandemic. Full article

Fish represent a politically regulated, scientifically researched, industrially processed, commercially marketed and socially contested living marine resource. Related to this, the incorporation of resource users and stakeholders into fisheries management is particularly important. Such involvement has recently improved in terms of frequency, but institutional frameworks often result in a lack of recognition and integration of the diverse ‘knowledges’ of stakeholders involved. Against this background, we aim to uncover the potentials of additional knowledge types for management purposes, paving the way toward a more collaborative management. We first conducted qualitative expert interviews with different stakeholder groups (e.g., commercial fisheries, eNGO and administration) to map various ‘knowledges’ about cod (Gadus morhua), a major resource species in the Western Baltic Sea to reveal the various experiences and epistemologies revolving around it. The second analytical step consisted of examining how these ‘knowledges’ structure, inform and often enter into conflict with perspectives on and assessments of fisheries management. Potentials were identified regarding enhanced stakeholder engagement in management processes that provide food for thought to seek change in sustainable management of fish stocks in the future. Our study is a pointer to the need to transform fisheries management in a more social and participatory way. We argue that sustainable natural resource management cannot be designed solely by integrating more ‘knowledges’ (knowledge sharing) but requires the creation of social contexts and institutions with stakeholder empowerment at the local level (power sharing) to sustainably manage natural resources such as commercially importance fish stocks. Full article

Citizenship Education could play a pivotal role in creating a fairer society in which all groups participate equally in the political progress. But strong causal evidence of which educational techniques work best to create political engagement is lacking. This paper presents the results of a systematic review of controlled trials within the field based on transparent search protocols. It finds 25 studies which use controlled trials to test causal claims between Citizenship Education programs and political engagement outcomes. The studies identified largely confirm accepted ideas, such as the importance of participatory methods, whole school approaches, teacher training, and doubts over whether knowledge alone or online engagement necessarily translate into behavioral change. But the paucity of identified studies also points both to the difficulties of attracting funding for controlled trials which investigate Citizenship Education as a tool for political engagement and real epistemological tensions within the discipline itself. Full article

This paper investigates how participatory knowledge production may contribute to more democratic sustainability governance. It develops an analytical framework in order to perform a systematic analysis of the GammaSense project in the Netherlands, on the measurement of gamma radiation by citizens. The paper first of all concludes that the way in which participation takes place throughout each and every stage of the knowledge production process, including technically complex issues such as the design of the measurement system and analytical toolset, has consequences for (a) which aspects of the gamma radiation decision-making process can potentially be democratized; (b) who gains a voice on the issue; (c) which form of democratization process is potentially facilitated. Secondly, the democratizing effects of setting the purpose of knowledge production, defining the research object and developing the methodological toolset are closely intertwined. Finally, providing space for multiple epistemologies and being attentive towards the role of material objects—the issue at hand and the methodological devices—are of crucial importance to realize the democratizing ambitions that the GammaSense project aimed to contribute towards. Full article

This study (conducted as PhD research at Rhodes University, South Africa) describes a formative interventionist research project conducted to explore factors inhibiting improved wetland management within a corporate plantation forestry context and determine if, and how, expansive social learning processes could strengthen organizational learning and development to overcome these factors. A series of formative interventionist workshops and feedback meetings took place over three years; developing new knowledge amongst staff of Company X, and improved wetland management practices. Through the expansive learning process, the tensions and contradictions that emerged became generative, supporting expansive learning that was reflectively engaged with throughout the research period. The study was== supported by an epistemological framework of cultural historical activity theory and expansive learning. Realist social theory, emerging from critical realism, with its methodological compliment the morphogenetic framework gave the research the depth of detail required to explain how the expansive learning, organizational social change, and boundary crossings that are necessary for assembling the collective were taking place. This provided ontological depth to the research. The research found that expansive learning processes, which are also social learning processes (hence we use the term ‘expansive social learning’, supported organizational learning and development for improved wetland management. Five types of changes emerged from the research: (1) Changes in structure, (2) changes in practice, (3) changes in approach, (4) changes in discourse, and (5) changes in knowledge, values, and thinking. The study was able to explain how these changes occurred via the interaction of structural emergent properties and powers; cultural emergent properties and powers; and personal emergent properties and powers of agents. It was concluded that expansive learning could provide an environmental education platform to proactively work with the sociological potential of morphogenesis to bring about future change via an open-ended participatory and reflexive expansive learning process. Full article